Thursday round-up

Posted Thu, March 14th, 2019 7:07 am by Edith Roberts

Briefly:

At The Daily Caller, Kevin Daley notes that “Chief Justice John Roberts has made common cause with the Supreme Court’s liberal bloc as late, breaking with his conservative colleagues on cases relating to abortion, the death penalty and President Donald Trump’s revised rules for asylum seekers,” and that “[i]n isolation, it’s difficult to know what to make of the chief’s votes.”

In an op-ed for Fox News, Kristen Waggoner hopes that the recent settlement between Colorado and Christian baker Jack Phillips, whose refusal on religious grounds to make a cake for a same-sex wedding led to one of last terms highest-profile cases, “signals an end to state-sponsored hostility toward religion in Colorado and a new era of tolerance and respect toward people of faith.”

At Just Security, Kristina Daugirdas discusses Jam v. International Finance Corporation, in which the court held that international organizations can be sued in U.S. courts for their commercial activities; she suggests that “assuring appropriate recourse for individuals who are harmed by international organizations remains a genuine problem[, and that] Jam didn’t get us to a solution, and may not even have brought us closer.”

At Law & Liberty, Mark Pulliam maintains that last term’s decision in Janus v. AFSCME, in which the court held that an Illinois law allowing public-sector unions to charge nonmembers for collective-bargaining activities violates the First Amendment, “signaled that its decades-old love affair with the NLRA—a New Deal-era statute that codified class struggle—is finally over.”

At Medium, Ned Foley looks at this term’s partisan-gerrymandering cases, Rucho v. Common Cause and Lamone v. Benisek, concluding that the court “should embrace Article I as a basis for judicial review of congressional gerrymanders pursuant to the exercise of its interpretative authority under Marbury v. Madison, while simultaneously eschewing the First Amendment and Equal Protection as grounds for this review.”

At The Atlantic, Scott Bullock and Nick Sibilla argue that even after the court’s unanimous ruling in Timbs v. Indiana that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines applies to states and localities, “further strengthening the excessive-fines clause is crucial to restraining the grasping hand of the government—because predatory policing remains widespread, part of a broader trend toward monetizing the U.S. criminal-justice system, with an increasing number of cities and private firms viewing fines and fees as a revenue source.”

We rely on our readers to send us links for our round-up. If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, podcast, or op-ed relating to the Supreme Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com. Thank you!

On Thursday, the justices met for their May 23 conference; John Elwood's Relist Watch compiles the petitions that were relisted for this conference.

Major Cases

Department of Commerce v. New York(1) Whether the district court erred in enjoining the secretary of the Department of Commerce from reinstating a question about citizenship to the 2020 decennial census on the ground that the secretary’s decision violated the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. 701 et seq; (2) whether, in an action seeking to set aside agency action under the APA, a district court may order discovery outside the administrative record to probe the mental processes of the agency decisionmaker -- including by compelling the testimony of high-ranking executive branch officials -- without a strong showing that the decisionmaker disbelieved the objective reasons in the administrative record, irreversibly prejudged the issue, or acted on a legally forbidden basis; and (3) whether the secretary’s decision to add a citizenship question to the decennial census violated the enumeration clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Lamone v. BenisekIn case in which the plaintiffs allege that a Maryland congressional district was gerrymandered to retaliate against them for their political views: (1) whether the various legal claims articulated by the three-judge district court are unmanageable; (2) whether the three-judge district court erred when, in granting plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment, it resolved disputes of material fact as to multiple elements of plaintiffs’ claims, failed to view the evidence in the light most favorable to the non-moving party, and treated as “undisputed” evidence that is the subject of still-unresolved hearsay and other evidentiary objections; and (3) whether the three-judge district court abused its discretion in entering an injunction despite the plaintiffs’ years-long delay in seeking injunctive relief, rendering the remedy applicable to at most one election before the next decennial census necessitates another redistricting.

The American Legion v. American Humanist Association(1) Whether a 93-year-old memorial to the fallen of World War I is unconstitutional merely because it is shaped like a cross; (2) whether the constitutionality of a passive display incorporating religious symbolism should be assessed under the tests articulated in Lemon v. Kurtzman, Van Orden v. Perry, Town of Greece v. Galloway or some other test; and (3) whether, if the test from Lemon v. Kurtzman applies, the expenditure of funds for the routine upkeep and maintenance of a cross-shaped war memorial, without more, amounts to an excessive entanglement with religion in violation of the First Amendment.

Gamble v. United StatesWhether the Supreme Court should overrule the “separate sovereigns” exception to the double jeopardy clause.

Recent Decisions

Herrera v. Wyoming Wyoming’s statehood did not abrogate the Crow Tribe’s 1868 federal treaty right to hunt on the “unoccupied lands of the United States”; the lands of the Bighorn National Forest did not become categorically “occupied” when the forest was created.

Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. v. Albrecht “Clear evidence” that the Food and Drug Administration would not have approved a change to a drug’s label – thus pre-empting a state-law failure-to-warn claim – is evidence showing that the drug manufacturer fully informed the FDA of the justifications for the warning required by state law and that the FDA, in turn, informed the drug manufacturer that the FDA would not approve a change to the drug’s label to include that warning; the question of agency disapproval is primarily one of law for a judge to decide.

Current Relists

Conference of May 23, 2019

al-Alwi v. Trump (1) Whether the government’s statutory authority to detain Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi has unraveled; (2) whether, alternatively, the government’s statutory authority to detain al-Alwi has expired because the conflict in which he was captured has ended; and (3) whether the Authorization for Use of Military Force authorizes, and the Constitution permits, detention of an individual who was not “engaged in an armed conflict against the United States” in Afghanistan prior to his capture.

Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky Inc. (1) Whether a state may require health-care facilities to dispose of fetal remains in the same manner as other human remains, i.e., by burial or cremation; and (2) whether a state may prohibit abortions motivated solely by the race, sex or disability of the fetus and require abortion doctors to inform patients of the prohibition.

Download our App in the Apple Store

On March 30, Justice Clarence Thomas spoke with former clerk Brittney Lane Kubisch and Pepperdine University President-elect James Gash at Pepperdine University School of Law. Thomas told the audience that he had no plans to retire from the Supreme Court.